Book Review: Radical Endurance: Growing Old in an Age of Longevity, by Andrea Gilats

By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookword Sez

“Radical Endurance: Growing Old in an Age of Longevity” by Andrea Gilats
c.2024, University of Minnesota Press
$19.95  232 pages

The mirror doesn’t lie.

You look into it and the person peering back at you sure seems familiar, but older. More fine lines around the mouth.. Grayer hair. Dimmer eyes. Dryer skin. All this happened when you weren’t watching and in the new book, “Radical Endurance” by Andrea Gilats, you’ll learn to embrace it and enjoy it longer.

A decade after she was widowed, eight years after she’d retired, Andrea Gilats “woke up one ordinary morning” and immediately felt “an obsessive need to come to terms with my seventy-fifth birthday….” Specifically, she suddenly felt as though she’d officially entered “old age,” and she was nowhere near prepared.

Experts on this kind of thing say that people over sixty-five have many reasons to think they can keep living happy, hale, and healthy, with no financial issues and lots of friends. Then again, “old age” is just one of many categories and Gilats doesn’t like categories.

She also doesn’t like to think of the medical issues of aging, unnecessary tests for something that won’t ultimately kill her, or diagnoses done that would only ruin the joy of living the years she has left. She is, conversely “not afraid to die, especially if I reach a point where my life is depleted of meaning.” Meaning is what the last of life is for.

And that was a hard-won feeling: for years after her husband, Tom, died, she “struggled with prolonged grief disorder” but these days, she knows joy. She doesn’t mind living alone – she has friends and enjoyed an “encore career” – but she sometimes wonders about the child she almost had, more than four decades ago. She knows that choices, made correctly at the time, are often bittersweet.

“Crying does me good,” she says.

So does “Freedom to remember, after a lifetime, what your dreams were…”

“After more than seventy-five years,” Gilats says, “I am learning… that not only are we not diminished in old age, we are replete with wisdom, the fruit that ripens only with age.”

There’ll be another candle on your birthday cake this year, and how do you feel about it?  If the answer is dread or dismay, then you need “Radical Endurance,” fast.

That’s because the best, and perhaps most wonderful, thing about this book is in its attitude adjustment powers. Author Andrea Gilats doesn’t write with singing birds and bluebells in her tales; instead, she shares with honesty about mind, body, and being in her seventh decade. Even the things she hints are embarrassing or irritating or sad are in this memoir, but the wry, slightly cynical humor she uses makes them feel less like complaint and more like commiseration. For sure, Readers of a Certain Age will know they’re in the company of someone who’s growing older right alongside them, and that embracing the years is better than okay.

You don’t have to be over 65 to enjoy “Radical Endurance,” but it helps. It’ll make you laugh, you’ll love the fellowship, and it’s a book you can easily see yourself reading.